Perfect in Their Art Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali Edited by Robert Hedin and Michael Waters Foreword by Budd Schulberg   November 2003 paper, 0-8093-2531-4, $19.95 cloth, 0-8093-2530-6, $49.95 240 pages, 5 ½ x 8 ½ Sports Literature / Poetry   Also of interest Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems     “What a paradox that the most brutal of sports is also the most sensitive and the most creative. . . . These are poems we want to go back and reread because the more they tell us about boxing, the more they tell us about the human condition.” —Budd Schulberg, from the Foreword   Two combatants, one ring, and a battle governed as much by determination and drive as by rules and referees: that’s boxing. Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali spans the millennia to present more than one hundred of the finest in pugilism poetry from both oral and written traditions, celebrating the lasting literary, historical, and cultural significance of boxing’s storied heritage.   Editors Robert Hedin and Michael Waters pulled no punches in assembling the definitive poems and poets of the sport. Works by such classical poets as Homer, Virgil, and Pindar are gathered here side-by-side for the first time with the poems of Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This provocative collection also features more recent literary heavyweights, including Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Levine, Wisława Szymborska, Ai, Yusef Komunyakaa, James Merrill, and Norman Mailer. Equally impressive is this anthology’s rich sampling of boxing music, including ballads, blues, marches, waltzes, and pop lyrics. Irving Berlin, Memphis Minnie, Leadbelly, Paul Simon, Warren Zevon, and Bob Dylan are only a few of the songwriters in this volume compelled to honor the sweet science.   Complemented by a foreword from On the Waterfront author Budd Schulberg, Perfect in Their Art offers glimpses into the boxing ring’s literal and metaphoric place as a popular stage for brutal but artful combat. Together these poems celebrate the heroes and traditions of this most primal competition across its many eras to provide an accurate, graceful, and spirited evocation of boxing’s cultural legacy as both sport and art.     from “The Fight of Sayerius and Heenanus” William Makepeace Thackeray   Then each his hand stretched forth to grasp, His foeman’s fives in friendly clasp; Each felt his balance trim and true— Each up to square his mauleys threw; Each tried his best to draw his man— The feint, the dodge, the opening plan, Till left and right Sayerius tried; Heenanus’ grin proclaimed him wide; He shook his nut, a lead essayed, Nor reached Sayerius’ watchful head. At length each left is sudden flung. We heard the ponderous thud, And from each tongue the news was wrung, Sayerius hath “First Blood”.     Robert Hedin is the author, translator, and editor of fifteen volumes of poetry and prose, most recently The Old Liberators: New and Selected Poems and Translations. He is the founding director of the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Red Wing, Minnesota.   Michael Waters is a professor of English at Salisbury University in Maryland and coeditor of Contemporary American Poetry. He is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems.